Saturn, so active in the cosmic changes, was regarded by all mankind as
the supreme god. Seneca says that Epigenes, who studied astronomy among
the Chaldeans, “estimates that the planet Saturn exerts the greatest
influence upon all the movements of celestial bodies.”(1) On becoming a
nova, it ejected filaments in all directions and the solar system became
illuminated as if by a hundred suns. It subsided rather quickly and
retreated into far-away regions.

Peoples that remembered early tragedies enacted in the sky by the
heavenly bodies asserted that Jupiter drove Saturn away from its place
in the sky. Before Jupiter (Zeus) became the chief god, Saturn (Kronos)
occupied the celestial throne. In all ancient religions the dominion
passes from Saturn to Jupiter.(2) In Greek mythology, Kronos is
presented as the father and Zeus as his son who dethrones him. Kronos
devours some of his children. After this act Zeus overpowers his father,
puts him in chains, and drives him from
his royal station in the sky. In Egyptian folklore or religion the
participants of the drama are said to be Osiris-Saturn, brother and
husband of Isis-Jupiter.

The cult of Osiris and the mysteries associated with it dominated the
Egyptian religion as nothing else. Every dead man or woman was entombed
with observances honoring Osiris; the city of Abydos in the desert west
of the Nile and north-west of Thebes was sacred to him; Sais in the
Delta used to commemorate the floating of Osiris’ body carried by the
Nile into the Mediterranean. What made Osiris so deeply ingrained in the
religious memory of the nation that his cult pervaded mythology and
religion? Osiris’ dominion, before his murder by Seth, was remembered
as a time of bliss.
According to the legend Seth, Osiris’ brother, killed and dismembered
him, whereupon Isis, Osiris’ wife, went on peregrinations to collect his
dispersed members. Having gathered them and wrapped them together with
swathings, she brought Osiris back to life. The memory of this event was
a matter of yearly jubilation among the Egyptians.(3) Osiris became lord
of the netherworld, the land of the dead. A legend, a prominent
part of the Osiris cycle, tells that Isis gave birth to Horus, whom she
conceived from the already dead Osiris,(4) and that Horus grew up to
avenge his father by engaging Seth in mortal combat.

In Egyptology the meaning of these occurrences stands as an unresolved
mystery. The myth of Osiris “is too remarkable and occurs in too many
divergent forms not to contain a considerable element of historic
truth,” wrote Sir Alan Gardiner, the leading scholar in these fields;(5)
but what historical truth is it? Could it be of “an ancient king upon
whose tragic death the entire legend hinged” ? wondered Gardiner.(6) But
of such a king “not a trace has been found before the time of the
Pyramid texts,” and in these texts Osiris is spoken of without end.
There he appears as a dead god or king or judge of the dead. But who was
Osiris in his life? asked Gardiner. At times “he is represented to us as
the vegetation which perishes in the flood-water mysteriously issuing
from himself. . . .” (7) He is associated with brilliant light.(8)

After a life of studying Egyptian history and religion Gardiner
confessed that he remained unaware of whom Osiris represented or
memorialized: “The origin of Osiris remains from me an insoluble
mystery.” (9) Nor could others in his field help him find an answer.

The Egyptologist John Wilson wrote that it is an admission of failure that
the chief cultural content of Egyptian civilization, its religion, its
mythological features again and again narrated and alluded to in texts
and represented in statues and temple reliefs, is not understood.(10)
The astral meaning of Egyptian deities was not realized and the cosmic
events their activities represent were not thought of.

* * *

The prophet Ezekiel in the Babylonian exile had a vision—the likeness of a
man, but made of fire and amber who lifted him by the lock of his hair
and brought him to some darkened chamber where the ancients of the house
of Israel with censers in their hands were worshipping idols portrayed
upon the wall round about. Then the angel of the vision told him: “Thou
shalt see greater abominations that they do"—and he brought the prophet
to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house—"and, behold, there sat
women weeping for Tammuz.” Next he showed him also Jews in the inner
court of the Lord’s house “with their back toward the temple of the Lord
and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the
east.” (11) The worship of the sun and the planets was decried by
Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel. But what was this weeping for Tammuz?

Tammuz was a Babylonian god; one of the months of the year,
approximately coinciding with July, in the summer, was named in his
honor; and by this very name it is known in the present-day Hebrew
calendar. Tammuz was a god that died and was then hidden in the
underworld; his death was the reason for a fast, accompanied by
lamentations of the women of the land. His finding or his return to life
in resurrection were the motifs of the passion.(12)

Tammuz was a god of vegetation, of the flood, and of seeds: “The god
Tammuz came from Armenia every year in his ark in the overflowing river,
blessing the alluvium with new growth.” (13) In the month of Tammuz he
was “bound, and the liturgies speak of his having been drowned among
flowers which were thrown upon him as he sank beneath the waves of the
Euphrates.” (14) The drowning of Tammuz was an occasion for wailing by
women: “The flood has taken Tammuz, the raging storm has brought him
low.” (15) Of Tammuz it also is narrated that he was associated with
brilliant light,(16) with descent into the nether world, visited there
by Ishtar, his spouse. Tammuz’ death, his subsequent resurrection, or
his discovery in the far reaches, but no longer brilliant, were the
themes of the cult that was not just one of the mysteries, but the chief
and paramount cult.

The Osirian mysteries, the wailing for Tammuz, all refer to the
transformation of Saturn during and following the Deluge. Osiris was not
a king but the planet Saturn, Kronos of the Greeks, Tammuz of the
Babylonians. The Babylonians called Saturn “the Star of Tammuz.” (17)
After the Deluge Saturn was invisible (the sky was covered for a long
time by clouds of volcanic dust) and the Egyptians cried for Osiris, and
the Babylonians cried for Tammuz. Isis (Jupiter at that time) went in
search of her husband, and Ishtar (also Jupiter at that early time) went
to the netherworld to find her husband Tammuz. For a time Saturn
disappeared, driven away by Jupiter, and when it reappeared it was no
longer the same planet: it moved very slowly.

The disappearance of the planet Saturn in the “nether world” became the
theme of many religious observances, comprising liturgies, mystery
plays, lamentations, and fasts. When Osiris was seen again in the sky,
though greatly diminished, the people were frenzied by the return of
Osiris from death; nevertheless he became king of the netherworld. In
the Egyptian way of seeing the celestial drama, Isis (Jupiter), the
spouse of Osiris (Saturn) wrapped him in swathings. Osiris was known as
“the swathed"—the way the dead came to be dressed for their journey to
the world of the dead, over which Osiris reigns. Similar rites were
celebrated in honor of Adonis, who died and was resurrected after a stay
in the netherland(18), in the mysteries of Orpheus.(19)

Sir James G. Frazer, the collector of folklore, came to regard Osiris as a
vegetation god(20); likewise he saw in the Babylonian Tammuz, an
equivalent of the Egyptian Osiris, a vegetation god and, carried away by
this concept, wrote his The Golden Bough,(21) built around the idea of
the vegetation god that dies and is resurrected the following year.

A few peoples through consecutive planetary ages kept fidelity to the
ancient Saturn, or Kronos, or Brahma,(22) whose age was previous to that
of Jupiter. Thus the Scythians were called Umman-Manda by the
Chaldeans (23)—"People of Manda"—and Manda is the name of Saturn.(24)
The Phoenicians regarded El-Saturn as their chief deity; Eusebius
informs us that El, a name used also in the Bible as a name for God, was
the name of Saturn.(25) In Persia Saturn was known as Kevan or
Kaivan.(26)

The different names for God in the Bible reflect the process of going
through the many ages in which one planet superseded another and was
again superseded by the next one in the celestial war. El was the name
of Saturn; Adonis of the Syrians, the bewailed deity, was also, like Osiris, the planet Saturn; but in the period of the contest between the
two major planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the apellative of the dual gods
became Adonai, which means “my lords” ; then, with the victory of
Jupiter, it came to be applied to him alone.(27)

7. Ibid., p. 426. [The connection of Osiris with water or
flood-water is frequently stressed both in native Egyptian sources and
in reports by classical and early Christian authors. Plutarch (De Iside
et Osiride 33. 364f) wrote that the Nile is the “moist principle and
power,” that the Nile is the “efflux of Osiris” (39. 366c, 32.363d,
38.366a) and that Osiris is Oceanus (34,364d). Cf. Griffiths, Plutarch’s
De Iside et Osiride, pp. 36, 56f., 424. See also Origen, Contra Celsum
5.38; Hippolytus, (Refutatio Omnium Haeresium 5.7.23) reported that the
Egyptians “say that Osiris is water.” Cf. also Sallustius, De diis et de
mundo, 4. Nock in his commentary to his edition of Sallustius (p.
xlviii, n. 44) compared a first century Greek papyrus (P. Leiden J. 384,
col. vii, 23) in which it is written “I am Osiris, who is called
‘water.’” The drowning of Osiris, described by Plutarch, is attested in
some of the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic texts. See K. Sethe, Die
altaegyptische Pyramidentexte 24D, 615D, 766D; cf. idem, Denkmal
Memphitischer Theologie 8, 10b, 19ff., 62ff; H. Gressmann, Tod und
Auferstehung des Osiris, pp. 4, 11-12, 39.].

22.
[That Brahma is Saturn was understood by Velikovsky as long ago
as the early 1940’s though he did not publish the idea until 1974 in the
text of his lecture before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science Symposium. See Pensée VII (1974), p. 10 and KRONOS III.2
(1977), p. 6. The identification of Brahma with Saturn is evidenced by
the fact that the god is assigned a celestial sphere (cf. The Ramayana,
transl. by R. Griffith, Vol. I [London, 1870], Canto XLV, p. 208; cf.
also The Kalika Purana, ch. xxv). A celestial sphere should probably be
interpreted as an orbit. In the Mahabharata it is further said that “the
high-souled Brahma [is] seated in the highest (abode)” (quoted in
Shastri, The Flood Legend, p. 10). The Brhad-aranyaka Uphanishad places
Brahman in the highest “world.” In the cosmology of the Yogabhasya of
Vyasa, the highest celestial sphere is that of Brahma. In the Vishnu
Purana the Brahmaloka, which is the heaven of Brahma, is the seventh and
highest heaven. In some sources the Brahmaloka is referred to as
Satyaloka. Cf. Tacitus, The Histories V. 4: “In the highest orbit and
exerting the greatest influence moves the star Saturn.” Many years ago
F. Wilford reported the opinion of certain learned Brahmins who told him
that while Shiva shines in the planet Jupiter, “Saturn is directed by
Brahma.” ("On Egypt etc. from the Ancient Books of the Hindus,” Asiatick
Researches III (1799), p. 382). Cf. E. Moor, The Hindu Pantheon 1864),
p. 218. I believe Wilford is the unacknowledged source of Moor’s
assertion that Brahma is Saturn. In China the planet Saturn was
associated with the palace and with the Emperor. It was called “the
planet of the Son of Heaven.” (Se-ma Ts’ien, Les memoires historiques,
ed. by E. Chavannes, vol. III, pt. 2, p. 367.)].

23.
Cyril I. Gadd, The Fall of Nineveh (London, 1926); cf. D. J.
Wiseman, The Chronicles of the Chaldean Kings in the British Museum
(London, 1956).

25.
Praeparatio Evangelica IV.xvi: “Kronos [El] was deified in the
star Saturn.” This statement is quoted by Eusebius from Philo’s
redaction of the lost Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon. Some
classical writers, among them Tacitus (Histories V.4) alleged that the
Jews were worshippers of Saturn; cf. Augustine’s refutation in Contra
Faustum Manichaeum XX. 13.